A history of miniature art : with notes on collectors and collections
A history of miniature art, written by J. L. Propert and published in London and New York by Macmillan in 1887, covers miniature painting, manuscript illumination and the collectors who gathered them. The plates show portrait miniatures in oval and rectangular frames, arranged on a plain grey ground like a museum display, with sitters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dress; a designer could take from them the tight oval format and the mix of gilt and jewelled frames.
